ACSP Weinblum

Minorities’ Political Participation in a Nationalising State: the Case of the Arab Minority of Israel ACSP Congress, Ottawa, May 2009 National Minorities and Nationalising States: a comparative perspective. Sharon Weinblum, Université libre de Bruxelles, Cevipol Introduction Israel corresponds in many ways to the concept of “nationalising state” developed by Brubacker. The Zionist project, following the nation-state model of its epoch was founded on the wish to create a “state of the Jews”. In 1948, Israel was established as the state of the Jewish people, and its symbols, goals and policies derive from this very definition of the state (Rouhana and Ghanem 1998). The Law of Return granting every Jewish person the right to automatically receive Israeli citizenship is amongst other policies, the most obvious element of the nationalising dimension of the Jewish state. In this context, the place of the Arab populations integrated in Israel after Israel formation has been quite complex and their inclusion in the polity has been only partial: if most of them have been granted citizenship after the independence, this is not the case of the East Jerusalem inhabitants who only enjoy a resident permit, meaning that they have the right to vote only in the local elections 1 and enjoy no representation in the national assembly. But even for the Israeli Arab citizens, the nationalising Jewish dimension has had major consequences on their symbolic and political place in the polity. Despite the fact that it represents 19% of the Israeli population according to the 2001 statistics (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2002), and in spite of many demands within and outside the Parliament, the Arab community 2 of Israel has never been recognised as a specific minority, suffers from many discriminations and, as a matter of fact, has never been granted minority protection and rights. In this perspective, the question of the Arab minority’s political participation in a “nationalising state” that defines itself as the state of the Jewish people seems primordial. As a channel of demands formulation and interests representation, political participation is indeed the specific tool of integration in contemporary democracies. This paper will not present all the political difficulties engendered by the definition of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” for the Arab minority. Its aim is to focus on the rationales that have been employed to justify the curtailment of the Arab parties’ political participation in elections for the legislative assembly, the Knesset. The paper is constructed in three parts. First, it briefly presents the complex political status of the Arab minority in Israel. In 1 After the annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel, permanent residents were permitted, if they wished and met certain conditions, to receive Israeli citizenship. These conditions included swearing allegiance to the State, proving that they are not citizens of any other country, and showing some knowledge of Hebrew. For political reasons, most of the residents did not request Israeli citizenship B’tselem Legal status of East Jerusalem and its residents 2 There is no consensus on the denomination of the Palestinian who received the Israeli citizenship and their children. While the “Israeli Arab” denomination is seen as part of a process implemented by the authorities to separate these population from their “real nation”, the “Palestinians of Israel” denomination also seems to load a specific image of the minority, as separated from the Israeli polity and citizenry. Hence, I have chosen to use the term that is referred to by most of their organisation, namely “Arab citizens” or “Arab minority”. a second part, the article identifies the rationales of the legislator to justify the enactment of several laws restricting participation to the elections. In a third part, the paper provides with an analysis of the discourses of three major actors over the question of political lists’ disqualification for elections: the political discourse, the legal discourse and the Jewish media’s discourses. The analysis shows that all the discourses over the Arab lists’ electoral participation entails a securitisation of their participation, which renders the Arab citizens inclusion extremely complicated. Political participation of the Arab minority in Israel Described as a “distinct national-religious-linguistic, non-assimilating and dissident minority, whose loyalty is suspect, who is discriminated against, does not accept its situation as a decree of fate, and is enlisted in a struggle to change its status” by a recent academic report (Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel 2004 , Smooha) the Arab minority’s political integration in Israel has been only partial. Due to the Jewish nationalising dimension on the one hand and the security dimension on the other, the Arab minority is indeed quite peripheral. As Shafir and Peled have shown, the construction of the state as that of the Jewish people has engendered the formation of a barrier between two spheres of citizenship: the republican citizenship for Jews on the one hand and the liberal citizenship for the Arab citizens (Shafir and Peled 2002) 3. Besides, the Arab minority has often been depicted as a minority culturally and symbolically identifying with neighbouring Arab states and as a result, the Palestinian citizens of Israel have been perceived as allies of the “enemy states”, and labelled as security risk with suspect loyalty to the state (Smooha 1993). As a consequence, a military administration was imposed on Arab inhabited regions 4, severely restricted their freedom of association (Smooha 1993). Hence, the only representatives the Arab minority had in the Knesset were lists named “minorities’ lists”, which were Arab lists running in the elections under the tutelage of a Zionist party -in most cases the Mapai. During the first decades, the Arab minority’s political alternative was thus either to vote in favour of a Zionist list or to vote in favour of the only non-Zionist party represented in the assembly: the Arab-Jewish communist party that historically defends a bi- national state. After the military rule was lift up in the mid-1960s, other non-Zionist parties defending the Arab minority were created: the El Ard party in 1965; the Progressive List for Peace in 1981 5; the Democratic Arab Party (Balad) in 1984; the Arab Movement for Change in 1996, and finally, in 2003, the united Arab list (Ta’al). Today, all Arab parties together dispose of 10 seats in the Knesset. However, despite this objective improvement in their representation, the Arab minority has remained excluded from all governments. Moreover, as will be shown in this paper, despite the formal improvement of the Arab political representation in the Knesset, political and legal discourses prevent a full legitimation of their political participation in the democratic process. Drawing on Kymlicka’s study of the Central and Eastern Europe elites’ discourses over minority’s rights 6, this paper offers an analysis of the rhetoric used by the legislator, the judiciary 3 For more in-depth analyses of the status of the Arab minority in Israel, see amongst others : Lustick 1980, Stendel 1996, Dowty 1998, ch.9, Smooha 1989 and 1992, Shafir and Peled 2002. 4 Galilee, “great triangle” near Oum el Fahm and “little triangle” in the Taybé region. 5 The party was an Arab-Jewish list defending the creation of a Palestinian state.It disappeared in 1992 after having lost representation in the Knesset. 6 In one of his article, Kymlicka shows that in order not to grant minority’s protection to their national minority, the political elites have used three kinds of arguments in order to delegitimise the minority’s demands: the priority to stabilisation discourse, the historical injustices discourse and the securitising discourse (Kymlicka 2004). and the media on the question of political participation of the Arab minority in Israel. It shows that two interrelated discourses are used toward the Arab political participation: a rhetoric linked to the security argument on the one hand and one relating to the Jewish definition of the State of Israel. Both contribute to the delegitimation of the Arab political participation and more broadly to their symbolic exclusion of the state. Legal constraints for running for the Knesset election: between defensive democracy, defence of the Jewish state and security concerns The objective of this section is to present the laws and the rationales underlying the laws specifying conditions for a party to be allowed to take part in the elections for the Knesset 7. The literature that is used to do this analysis are secondary sources as well as the Knesset protocols. During the two first decades of the state, all political parties were allowed to take part in the electoral process. It is in 1965 that discussions over the limitation of a party’s participation in elections first appeared when the El Ard movement tried to register on the electoral lists. The Central Electoral Committee (CEC), composed of Knesset members and headed by a Supreme Court justice, entitled to supervise the electoral process and to register parties for the electoral competition, then decided to deny the registration of El Ard. The major argument of the CEC to disqualify the party was that its platform denied Israel territorial integrity and right to exist. The argument was based on the party’s platform which comprised statements, such as “the Palestinian problem [can be solved] by seeing it as an indivisible unit in accordance with the desire of the Arab Palestinian people” (Cohen-Almagor 1997). When the movement petitioned the Supreme Court to challenge the decision, the Court authorised the disqualification of the party on behalf of “[…] the most elementary right of every state to defend its freedom and very existence against enemies from without and against their followers at home” (Election Appeal E.A.

Load more